We rated this game as one of the best interactive online games we’ve encountered, with great graphics and impressive location set ups. It can be personalised with your photograph and other details. The game was produced by Konami mobile, creators of a multitude of high end games which can be purchased for use on your mobile.

Faces of Foolong

This site was produced by the California Milk Processor Board as an entertaining and integrated online resource for consumers. Featuring graphics, flash animation and games to positively promote the benefits of drinking milk. We are well impressed with its design and layout.

Got Milk

It was only a matter of time! If nobody cares to listen to your dieting woes, log on to Fatsecret, a social networking site for dieters. Share and review diets, upload your recipes, discuss diets with fellow members and support each other.

Fatsecret

We’ve been oohing and ahhing over this month’s selection and also wondering, just what kind of budgets are in operation on several of these beauties? Not a shouty or brash infomercial in sight! All cinematic, breathtaking and truly gorgeous.

Underwater Circus

BBC goes cinematic

MTV Burma Invite

Click Through Rate

This term refers to web banner and text link advertisements, this rate is defined as Clicks on Ads / Total Number of Impressions. Anything over 2% is considered a success.

CPM

This refers to Click Per Thousand, M referring to the roman numeral for thousand. The clicks are click throughs on online advertising.

Intersticial

This is an ad which comes between a link and a page, generally considered an irritant as often the viewer has to wait until the ads completion before they get to view the content they were originally looking for.

4th Screen

This refers to mobile screens, the 4th available screen that can be used for advertising. The others are cinema, TV and the internet on a PC or laptop. Opinion is split between those who believe it is the way forward for advertisers and those who believe it can never be a powerful enough platform for advertising.

Conversion Rate

The number of sales divided by the number of clicks on your ad, measuring how well you’re turning potential customers into buyers. If your website has 50 visitors and five of them convert to sale then you have achieved a 10% conversion rate.

Innovative brand managers are giving consumers a platform to create new campaigns and advertising content, such as L’Oreal’s You Make The Commercial, Mastercard’s Write a Priceless Ad, JetBlue’s Travel Stories and McDonalds Global Casting. The wisdom of the populace can also inform you if your brand awareness is waning and your campaigns are getting tired. Budding marketers, animators, writers and film directors would convulse at the thoughts of getting an opportunity to have an input into new campaigns for your brand.

In another twist, smart advertisers are exploiting User Generated Content to draw more traffic to their sites and it’s working. What’s the best way to get people generating content for your website? Just make it fun and make sure you recognise their efforts. Why do people want to generate content? For attention. To express an opinion or let off steam. To feel like they have a say, they matter. To benefit others. The latest example of this is the Land Rover Go Beyond campaign, where people are invited to upload their adventure stories at:

Land Rover: Go Beyond

One man + One game + One car = The Happiest Dentist in Ireland.

Forget the Dalai Lama, Tony Robbins or even Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. You’re about to meet the most contented bloke out there and his name is Mike Sweeney. Mike is living the dream from behind the wheel of his Toyota Auris. So much so, he lives in his Auris day and night, even operating his dental clinic from within its four doors! But his passions don’t end there. Mike is a staunch GAA fanatic, sporting a jersey emblazoned with all of the county crests. With 18 weeks of thrilling football action to follow this summer, he’s hoping there’s room on the sidelines for the Official Dentist of the GAA Football Championships. Follow Mike on his escapades as he schmoozes with Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, as his wife Hillary makes futile attempts to coax him out of his Toyota and back to the marital home and as Mike pushes for the founding of a Gaelic Automobile Association.

This un-missable 8-part documentary kicks off on June 20th at MeetMike.ie

You can also read Mike’s blog, get top tips to living in your car and all the Championship nitty gritty! The series was created and produced by eighty:twenty in conjunction with Cashmere Media.

Are clicks still the most accountable metric for analysing your campaigns? With an evolving digital media landscape and a huge leap forward in technology, have you considered post-view activity, engagement, page views and more importantly, sales revenue?

We are telling our clients not to measure success of a campaign by its CTRs. With DR (Direct Response), it’s about efficiencies including sales which can be tracked using 3rd party ad-servers. When it comes to branding, the emphasis should be on engagement and how users interact with your ad on different websites.

Two out of three internet users are signed up to various social networks and advertisers have been scrambling to be part of this new wave of activity. Many have been disappointed by poor CTR figures, the simple explanation being that users on these websites like to interact with their surroundings but don’t want to be shipped off to another website to find more information. By using additional tracking tools, advertisers can see to what extent the user engages with their advertisement. This could be opening an expansion, playing a video to turning on the sound.

Suppliers have only recently started selling on a CPE (cost per engagement) basis which incorporates the understanding that not all users want to move directly to the advertisers’ website, yet are showing an interest by viewing and interacting with the advertisement. This new option will be available on a number of leading social networks such as YouTube, Flixter and Facebook.

To put it simply, eighty:twenty still see a value in clicks but are researching smarter ways to assess the performance of our digital campaigns.

by James Carr & Frances Macken

The epitome of cool for big brands right now is surely to appear in video and computer in-game advertising. It’s the most exciting medium to operate within and reaches quite a specific demographic, the prime target being the 18-34 year old male who is spending less time watching TV and more time playing video games. Estimates suggest that the spend on in game advertising will grow to $1.8 billion by 2010. Let’s look at the recently released statistics for Xbox Live. In the first week of its release, more than 2.3 million people played Grand Theft Auto IV on Xbox and on one weekend, notched up 1 million concurrent users. The average gamer played for four hours during the first week of release.

Generally, static banners and product placements are the old reliables of in game advertising. But how do gamers feel about product placement? Relevancy seems to be the key factor here. Rigorous standards are in place so that advertising does not detract from the gamers experience. If the gamer is unhappy, they stop using the games and all benefits are lost. Other methods used by advertisers are to drop in logos, billboards and static ads at various locations within the game. To take one example, in a football game like FIFA International Soccer, gamers would expect to see billboard advertisements structured around the pitch, bringing a coherent reality to the game. Soft drinks, pizza boxes, images on TV screens etc. are just some of the methods through which advertisers can communicate with the gamer.

For the agencies responsible for placing the ads, there are various manipulatory capabilities to ensure their ad gets shown in the correct geographic location or time of day. Due to the increasing usage of internet connectivity and games being played live, data can be filtered through from the player’s machine regarding advertisement performance, time spent looking at advertisements, types of advertisement which are most effective etc. Like TV, gaming can have ‘prime slots’ when activity is at its highest. Other ads can be built in to the game and cannot be changed or removed. Systems can be put in place so that inappropriate ads do not appear to younger gamers, such as ads for alcohol or featuring adult content.

The major agencies facilitating in game advertising right now are IGN, Massive (which has been snapped up by Microsoft) and IGA Worldgroup. Sony are also opening up their own in-game advertising platform to spark a battle amongst the agencies already selling these ads.

by Frances Macken

We took a call the other day. Brand Manager. Voice all a-quiver.

“Our global team wants me to organise a digital campaign. I don’t know what to do! Where do I start? Who can I turn to? I can’t eat, I can’t sleep…I’m a mess!”

Our hearts went out to him. Needless to say, we put him straight through to the hotline.

“We can diagnose this with relative ease. F.D.A.D. That’s Fear of Digital Advertising Disorder. You’re not alone. In fact, there are thousands of brand managers globally with the same disorder. You’ll be glad to know that with a little professional help, we can nip this in the bud.”

It’s satisfying, this digital advertising business. Being helpful, giving advice and creating smashing campaigns for brand managers everywhere. It’s a vocation really. But let’s delve a little deeper into F.D.A.D.

Causes & Symptoms:

• A denial that digital advertising is more accountable and trackable, less intrusive and more engaging than TV or print campaigns.
• Can be associated with a fear of all things digital/technical. Not understanding jargon, how digital advertising is measured, how to appeal to the various demographics who utilise the net.
• Also connected to nostalgic yearnings for marketing times past. When coupons were all the rage. When kids got excited by lollipops stuck to the front of a magazine. When infomercials didn’t irritate the hell out of everyone. When cheese on toothpicks on a supermarket stand was the height of marketing brilliance. When junk mail didn’t get those irksome eco-warriors up in arms about the decimation of the rainforests. When leaflets were willingly received by pedestrians on the street. Alas, 1993 has been and gone.
• Fear of trying new things. Why eat brioche on roller skates when you could eat crumpets in your slippers?

Case Study:

• Brand Manager A has brought his brand to prominence through print and TV campaigns. He’s feeling rather pleased with himself. And so he should. But he’s got nothing else up his sleeve. Brand Manager B also brought his brand to prominence through print and TV campaigns. But he’s eager to probe the potentialities of digital advertising too. He contacted a digital advertising agency who rustled up a slick campaign for his brand. They created a brand presence on social networking sites, a series of webisodes, interactive ads on specially targeted sites. His brand has truly spanned across the generations. Consumers recognise the brand because they’ve interacted with it online, it’s credible, it’s cool, it’s fresh. Brand Manager A ponders why his brand has reached its peak over the last number of years and isn’t climbing any higher, while nibbling on a crumpet and wearing his slippers. Brand Manager B whoops with glee as his product is getting snapped up by teenagers and young professionals with plenty of disposable income. And he can track how successful his new digital campaign has been. While eating brioche on his roller skates.

Cures:
Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom for people like Brand Manager A. All that’s required is a spark of innovation, a yearning to appeal to the masses in an original way. Advertising is about invention, ingenuity. Remember when you joined the game. When you enjoyed thrashing out ideas of how to recruit new consumers to your brand. Those days can be revisited! Think in game advertising, branded social network pages, cool interactive games that draw in the demographic you need. You might feel, why fix something that’s not broken? If your advertising strategy has worked effectively thus far, why would you consider digital advertising? Because effective isn’t ambitious. Effective isn’t progressive. Effective isn’t forward thinking.

As a brand manager, you don’t need to be au fait with programming, streaming or any of those other preposterous terms we like to throw about. We understand what they mean, how effective they are and can communicate this very well to you. We’ll do our job and you can do yours.

Bring in the experts. Call our hotline now to see what we can do for you and your brand.

By Frances Macken.